


Stars, in their multitude

by moodyme



Series: The Magic of the Shining Skies [3]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Adam Parrish & Blue Sargent Friendship, Astronomy, F/M, Fluff, Gansey being a supportive boyfriend, Light Angst, M/M, The feelings of finding your truly desired career path in adulthood after everybody else did at 18, astronomer!Blue, background pynch fluff, but it's so light you may not even feel it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-10 15:04:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20530001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moodyme/pseuds/moodyme
Summary: Blue Sargent is 28 years old when she admits to Gansey that her childhood dream had been to become an astronomer. Gansey (and Adam) encourages (bully) her to pursue her dream anyway.





	Stars, in their multitude

**Author's Note:**

> Is the title a not-so-vague reference to Les Mis? Why, yes indeed it is!  
This is super unimportant, but with this fic, I am at an even 88,888 word-count on this site, which makes me feel so uhhh... satisfied?

Blue is walking hand in hand with Gansey down a street she doesn't know the name of in the cold, industrial, port town of Ushuaia. She keeps her focus to the Northwest, to Glaciar Martial. It's beautiful, and Blue is almost sad to leave for the Antarctic cruise in the morning. But the promise of penguin sighting diminishes her sadness as quickly as it had come on.

"The stars are different, here, at night," Gansey says. Blue looks to the sky, furtively, knowing that it is mid-afternoon. That there are no stars visible.

"Mm," Blue hums, "Because of the difference in the hemisphere. We should be able to see Alpha Centauri and Canopus really well tonight."

Blue wondered why Gansey had brought it up. They had spent much of the past two years together south of the equator, the stars being different was nothing new.

"What about constellations?" Gansey asks, tugging her up along a different street.

"Oh, well," She says, "There's the Southern Cross, obviously, which isn't really a constellation, but an asterism. It's a part of the constellation Crux. Did you know that before the equinoxes shifted with the precession of equinoxes, Crux was actually visible in Europe? So until, like, 6,000 years ago, the Southern constellations, like Crux and Musca and Centaurus were totally visible in most of the Northern hemisphere, even as far north as the British Isles."

"Huh," Gansey says, "What else can you see from the Southern hemisphere that you can't from the Northern?"

Blue tells him about the Jewel Box and the Coal Sack and the Omega Centauri globular cluster and 30 Doradus, "Which," She says, excitedly, "Is so bright, if it were as close as the Orion Nebula, it would cast _shadows_."

Gansey listens, attentive, asks her more detailed questions, asks her to explain certain terms.

Later, he says, causally, "I've noticed it before, but you know a lot about space."

Blue laughs, and it hurts, just a little. But it's an old hurt, and she's gotten good at ignoring it.

"I've always loved the stars," She says, "When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronomer. Too bad I got rejected by all the colleges I applied to, huh?"

"Oh, Jane, that's-" Gansey says, but Blue interrupts him, waves his earnestness aside and laughs it off.

The next day, when they board the ship, Blue has mostly forgotten the conversation.

Blue's first thought upon seeing the telescope that Gansey is hunkered over, assembling it, is that it is beautiful. Her second, is that she doesn't want to know how much it cost. 

"What's that?" She asks, sidling up next to Gansey, peering over his shoulder to get a better look.

"Uh," He mumbles, glances to the box several feet away, "The Celestron VX something or other?"

Blue hums. She reaches over to grab the instruction guide that was left in the box, and together, they spend the next several hours putting the mount together and learning about the scope's capabilities. As day fades to evening to night, Blue sets the scope to Polaris.

"It's the North Star," Blue says, "If you can find Ursa Major, or the Big Dipper, than you can look north to the handle of the Little Dipper. That's Polaris. There's a report that its more than 2 times brighter now than when Ptolemy observed it, which could totally change the current theory of stellar evolution."

"_I am as constant as the northern star, of whose true-fixed and resting quality there is no fellow in the firmament."_ Gansey replies, moving to look away from the scope lens and to where Blue is pointing at the star. "_The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks, they are all fire and every one doth shine, but there’s but one in all doth hold his place so in the world_."

"Shakespeare?" Blue asks. It was something he just _did _sometimes, quote the bard without a thought, with a fluidity that had come from a Classical education with a hefty price tag.

"Yes, from '_J__ulius Caesar_'," Gansey answers, going back to look through the lens.

"Well," Blue huffs, "That's ridiculous."

"How?" Gansey says.

"There _wasn't_ a constant North star in Caesar's day," Blue informs him, letting a bit of frustration leak into her voice, "And even if you made the argument that it was Kochab, which, it wasn't, not really, not like Polaris is now, it still wouldn't make sense. Polaris is a Cepheid, it's constantly changing. "

"Huh," Gansey says, and goes back to looking at Polaris through the lens, unsuccessfully hiding a grin while he does so.

They, and Noah, are staying with Adam and Ronan for the weekend, celebrating the former's return from space, from the _moon_. It quickly becomes a celebration of their engagement when Adam lets the news slip after one too many cheap beers they drink on the patio.

She catches her boyfriend and Adam whispering about something in the kitchen one evening, just after she says goodnight to Noah and Ronan, but she mostly ignores it. The two had developed, as Ronan had once dubbed it, a 'Purely platonic, yet weirdly homoerotic friendship, that was based on mutual respect, admiration, and adoration'. Blue had long ago gotten used to their secret, whispered, conversations.

But the next morning, she wakes up to a stack of papers being dumped on the air mattress in the un-used third bedroom of Adam and Ronan's house.

"What's all this?" She yawns.

"A list of schools," Gansey tells her. She opens her eyes to look at him and is surprised by how, not stern. Determined? He looks. "That offer Astronomy and Astrophysics programs."

"Why?" She asks, taking the first few pages that had been stapled together and flipping through them.

"Because you should apply," Gansey says. "Because I don't think you'll be completely happy until you do."

"Gansey," She says, and her voice is so gentle, it surprises even her, "Gansey, I am happy. Completely. With you. With the work I do, that we do together."

And Gansey talks on and on, and Blue gets agitated, and the conversation ends in an argument.

Later that evening, she is still frustrated with Gansey, more so when he somehow gets Noah in his corner, who offers her a scholarship for being 'such a faithful and diligent employee'. The two of them try and take her into applying while Henry bothers Adam and Ronan about the wedding, and Blue is ready to storm out. She doesn't. That's not how her and Gansey's relationship worked. They would get angry, fight, argue. But neither was really capable of just _walking away _from the other.

Eventually, Henry leaves the room, and they all hear him erupt in laughter. Blue, in surprise, looks to Adam for an explanation, but he is too busy giving a very flustered looking Ronan a wicked grin to catch her eye. When she looks back at Gansey and Noah, she finds the latter missing.

"Noah's gone to check on Henry," Gansey says, his voice doing that stiff thing it always did when he had set his mind on something. Then, his face crumples, and it nearly breaks her heart, and when he speaks again, his voice is soft and lacking all of the determination of before, "Why won't you even consider it?"

"Honey," She sighs, knows she sounds as defeated as he looks, "I am almost thirty years old. It's too late."

And just like that, Gansey is determined again, his eye's on fire and his voice once again stern, as he says, loudly, "If you're alive, than it's not too late."

"Is everything alright?" Adam suddenly asks, and Blue wonders when he had left Ronan and the couch and come up beside them. His hand is gentle when he places it on her shoulder, as gentle as the concerned look he is giving Gansey.

"I am trying to convince Blue to apply to an Astronomy program," Gansey says. The name startles Blue, and hurts, too, just a little.

"Wha-" Adam says, is obviously confused. But Blue watches as remembrance flashes across his face, and suddenly they are sixteen and dreaming of a way out of their small town and the things that bind them to it. For Blue, the ties of a loving family were sometimes suffocating, and she needed a place all her own, to forge her own path. For Adam, it had been the call of a different kind of freedom; the freedom of the _other_ that had been out there, somewhere. Suddenly they were sixteen, and the whole world was theirs for the taking, and they were going to have, to form it in their image. Dreams weren't dreams, they were concrete plans. They were the future. 

But reality was Adam getting accepted into the Air Force Academy, and Blue getting her third and final rejection letter.

So, being the sensible girl she was, she had grinned and bore it. Had gone to Colorado, got a job with Noah. And when he offered to fund her work with ecological conservation, another dream, she had jumped. Because she was sensible. And she worked for the environment and advocated and researched and traveled and all the while, she had looked at the stars, and loved them. 

"There's no harm in applying," Adam says, and when he shrugs, Blue hates him just a little bit.

"Rejection hurts a shit ton," She growls.

"So does going to sleep at night asking yourself, '_What if?'"_ Gansey says, reaching for her hand. She allows it, and squeezes his hand harder to show she isn't terribly angry, or upset.

"Besides," Adam drawls in a way she hasn't heard in _age's,_ his old accent smoothing out the edges, "They would be fucking stupid to reject you, Blue Sargent."

In the end, she applies to 12 schools. Three of which reject her only weeks after she applies. The one she didn't even actually want to go it accepts her the week after her three rejections. And then another two schools reject her. Then, after already coming to grips with the fact she was probably going to the one school she applied to that she _didn't want to attend, _all of the final six schools accept her.

She decides on the University of Maryland. Somewhat because it's close to home, and she hadn't lived that close in a decade. Somewhat on the fact that Gansey was offered a job in D.C, and its a 30 minute commute from the campus. Somewhat because she had been offered a decent financial aid package.

But mostly because the astronomy program was good there.

She studies to regain her math skills, studies even harder to get them to a higher level than they had ever been so she doesn't fall behind in the physics and math courses for her major. And between the studying and the preparing for classes and the moving to the home Gansey buys near campus ('It's so much more economically sound to purchase a home than to rent, darling, really,'), life goes on. She is Adam's Best Woman at his wedding, and she and Helen try to drink each other under the table at the reception. Her dad shows up again, out of nowhere, and offers her unsolicited advice about a career in astronomy and she remembers that he shared her passion for the stars. And at some point, Henry and Noah become a _thing_. And a thousand other remarkably unremarkable occurrences that make up life.

She begins her classes in August, and it's the most difficult work she has ever done, and she almost drops out. But. But, even though it's the most difficult work she has ever done, it makes her insufferably happy. She loves it, even when she is pulling an all nighter in an attempt to grasp the concepts discussed in that days astrophysics class. 

On a warm morning in May, with her hat decorated with fake crystals in the shape of the Corvus constellation, she graduates. With honors.

After, Ronan holds Opal and chats with Jimi and Persephone. Noah and Orla have a discussion on the afterlife that Dean is listening to intently. Helen and Gansey's parents argue over the latter's new buzz-cut. And Maura has her and Adam re-create their high school graduation pictures, directs them to stand in poses they only half-remember. Once her mother is satisfied, she finds Gansey, who hugs her tightly and whispers 'congratulations' to her for the hundredth time that day.

"Y'know," Blue laughs, "I probably won't even be able to get a job without a PhD."

"Oh!" Gansey says, "I've been researching doctorate programs and..."

**Author's Note:**

> This ends the way it does because I actually really really really wanted to have that even 88,888 word count. Sorry not sorry.  
Was this a way to hopefully nudge someone (myself?) into going after a dream even though they (I?) arent 18 anymore? Yes. Yes it was.


End file.
